The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5 Read online

  Copyright © 2007 by Roy MacGregor

  This omnibus edition published in 2007 by McClelland & Stewart

  The Secret of the Deep Woods copyright © 2003 by Roy MacGregor

  Murder at the Winter Games copyright © 2004 by Roy MacGregor

  Attack on the Tower of London copyright © 2004 by Roy MacGregor

  The Screech Owls’ Reunion copyright © 2004 by Roy MacGregor

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacGregor, Roy, 1948–

  The complete Screech Owls / written by Roy MacGregor.

  Contents: v. 1. Mystery at Lake Placid – The night they stole the Stanley Cup – The Screech Owls’ northern adventure – Murder at hockey camp – v. 2 Kidnapped in Sweden – Terror in Florida – The Quebec City crisis – The Screech Owls’ home loss – v. 3. Nightmare in Nagano – Danger in Dinosaur Valley – The ghosts of the Stanley Cup – The West Coast murders – v. 4. Sudden death in New York City – Horror on River Road – Death Down Under – Power play in Washington – v. 5. Secret of the deep woods – Murder at the winter games – Attack on the Tower of London – The Screech Owls’ reunion.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-241-9

  I. Title.

  PS8575.G84C64 2005 jC813’.54 C2005-903880-2

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Secret of the Deep Woods Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Murder at the Winter Games Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Attack on the Tower of London Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  The Screech Owls’ Reunion Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  The Secret of the Deep Woods

  1

  “HE’S GONNA HURL!”

  Nish didn’t even bother cracking back. For once he was sure he was going to hurl – no joke this time, no outrageous stunt intended to break up the team and make him, as usual, the centre of attention.

  The only attention Wayne Nishikawa wanted at the moment was medical.

  And not just one doctor, but a whole hospital if possible, with specialists around the world linked up by the Internet.

  Whatever it took to make these hideous cramps go away!

  It felt like a hockey game was going on down there. He could feel skates slicing through his churning gut. It felt, at times, as if a Zamboni were being driven through his intestines.

  He touched his swollen stomach. It seemed distended, the skin about to split. Something moved beneath his hand. It felt just like his Aunt Lucy’s stomach when she’d been pregnant with his cousin, Sydney. Nish had been asked if he’d like to feel the baby move. He’d never been so disgusted in his life! But his mother had forced his shaking, clammy hand onto her sister’s big beachball of a belly and … yes … it had felt just like this.

  He couldn’t be? Could he?

  Nish ran the back of his hand across his brow. It was soaking wet. The sweat was rolling into his eyes and the salt was stinging and making him blink, faster and faster.

  What if he was pregnant?

  He’d be a freak of nature if he were. They’d have him on Ripley’s Believe It or Not! He’d be on the front page of those stupid newspapers his mother always flicked through when she was stalled in the grocery checkout line:

  PEEWEE HOCKEY PLAYER BENCHED FOR BEING PREGNANT!

  THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY HAS BABY!

  CANADIAN BOY GIVES BIRTH TO GIANT PUCK!

  He couldn’t be pregnant, could he? How could it have happened? You couldn’t get pregnant from showing up at a nudist beach – could you?

  Nish knew he was thinking crazy. But his stomach was killing him. He tried to calm himself down. He began breathing slowly, deliberately. He bent over to ease the pain and tried to think it through. What had he eaten?

  The Screech Owls were on a canoe trip into the interior of Ontario’s Algonquin Park, a wilderness reserve bigger than the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, and at the gate he’d been made to hand over his precious food supply – licorice twisters, Double Bubble gum, jujubes, Hot Rods, Cheesies, and Mars, Aero Mint, Sweet Marie, and Crispy Crunch chocolate bars – after the rangers had warned the Owls about the danger of marauding bears.

  Black
bears had been seen at a number of campgrounds in the park. In one case, a bear had ripped a pack right out of the tree where it had been tied for the night and made off with the campers’ food. In another, a big bear had trampled a tent down on a terrified older couple, sending them screaming for the lake while the animal ripped apart their sleeping bags in search of some popcorn they had brought to bed as a late-night snack.

  That spelled the end of any hope Nish had of surviving in the wilds on his usual diet of sugar, chocolate, licorice, peanut butter, and more sugar – or, as he preferred to call it, a healthy, balanced diet. “A little dairy in the Hershey bars, fresh fruit in the jujubes, and I even make sure I get my greens – green licorice, that is.”

  Muck and Mr. Dillinger had insisted the kids empty out their candy supplies, and they had begun with Nish’s pack, which held little else but junk food. They’d taken all this wonderful, healthy nourishment and thrown it into the animal-proof dumpster at the Lake Opeongo outfitters.

  Since then, Nish had eaten nothing but the awful, tasteless, boring dried food packs that Mr. Dillinger had brought along and was cooking up for everyone. And that was an important point – in fact, the most important point he’d come up with since he’d been stricken with this terrible pain. Same for the blueberries they’d picked and eaten along the first portage.

  If everybody had eaten exactly the same food since they started out on Sunday, and this was late Tuesday night, then he shouldn’t be the only one about to hurl. If it were indeed food poisoning, then all the Screech Owls would be affected. Travis Lindsay and Sarah Cuthbertson would be out of their tents, too. And Dmitri Yakushev and Fahd Noorizadeh. And Wilson Kelly and Willie Granger and Jenny Staples and Jeremy Weathers. And Samantha Bennett and Gordie Griffith and Lars Johanssen and Andy Higgins. And Derek Dillinger and Liz Moscovitz and Simon Milliken. And Jesse Highboy and his cousin, Rachel. Mr. Dillinger, the team manager, would be out here hurling. And so, too, would coach Muck Munro, whose idea it had been in the first place to head into the bush during the week between the end of lacrosse season and the opening of the Tamarack rink for the upcoming hockey season.

  Nish would rather have passed on the whole stupid trip, thank you very much. When Muck and Mr. Dillinger had talked about the joy of canoeing and the pretty sunsets and the chance of seeing moose and deer in the park, Nish had raised his hand and suggested they rent a National Geographic tape and order in pizza and pop while they all sat around Fahd’s big-screen TV and watched it.

  But now here he was, a hostage to Mr. Dillinger’s suggestion that the team would “bond” on such a trip – and it was beginning to look like he mightn’t survive long enough to watch even one more television show or eat one more string of green licorice.

  His stomach was absolutely killing him.

  It couldn’t have been the ridiculous trick Lars and Andy tried to pull on him, could it? Andy had smuggled in an empty Glossettes box, and he and Lars had filled it with rabbit droppings; they looked just like real chocolate-covered raisins through the little cellophane window in the box. They’d come up to Nish and tried to get him to hold out his hand to take a share. But he hadn’t fallen for it. He was too smart for them. He hadn’t touched the rabbit “raisins.” So it couldn’t have been that. He’d eaten some blueberries, but everyone had been picking and eating blueberries, so it couldn’t have been that, either.

  There was no further sound from the tent Nish was sharing with Travis, Fahd, and Lars. Whoever had whispered “He’s gonna hurl!” was now snoring with the rest of them.

  How long had he been out here?

  Nish straightened up. He felt his brow, dry now and no longer cold to the touch. His stomach wasn’t churning and twisting quite as sharply as it had been.

  He lifted his beloved Lake Placid T-shirt and ran a hand over his stomach.

  No movement. No hideous, slimy, three-headed monster about to burst through his belly button and turn screaming on him with razor-sharp teeth in all three heads.

  I need some water, Nish thought.

  He had no idea where Mr. Dillinger had put the drinking water. He knew, because he had helped hoist it up, that the food pack was high in a tree, dangling from a thick rope, well out of reach of raccoons and bears, as well as highly talented thirteen-year-old defencemen.

  He looked off towards the lake. The wind was down now, and the waves very gently lapping the small beach at the foot of the campsite. The path was easy to make out in the moonlight.

  Nish began making his way down to the water, a short, thickset young man in a T-shirt with both sleeves ripped off to show non-existent muscles, and his boxer shorts hanging so far down it was a wonder they didn’t fall.

  A loon laughed somewhere out on the water. Who could blame it?

  Nish bowed gracefully towards the call. “Thank you,” he said in a terrible Elvis Presley impersonation. “Thank you very much.”

  He was about to lean down and scoop up some water when, from somewhere high up behind the trees, he heard a strange sound. Not the sound of an animal or a bird, but of something mechanical. Something sputtering, then silent, then sputtering again. Then complete silence.

  He looked above him just in time to see something pass over the pines. It was huge, whatever it was.

  There seemed to be flames spurting from it, then the flames stopped, then started again.

  It was moving very quickly across the sky. There were red, white, and green lights flashing.

  It turned suddenly, almost as if it sensed someone was watching from below. Nish thought it was coming straight at him, coloured lights flashing, transforming the entire black sky over Algonquin Park into a giant pinball machine.

  He knew instantly what it was.

  His stomach wrenched again, stabbing with new pain.

  A UFO!

  2

  “I BELIEVE … I WAS … ABDUCTED.”

  Nish winced at his own words, but they were out of his mouth before he could stop them. He wished he could grab them back and stuff them into whatever black hole of insanity they had popped out of. He wished he had never started! It was like he was giving a talk in front of the class and he was the only one who hadn’t noticed he’d just peed his khaki pants, or had something green and slimy hanging from his nose.

  The rest of the Owls were trying, but not very hard, to keep straight faces as he explained over breakfast what had happened the night before.

  “It was probably a refuelling stop,” giggled Sam. “They ran out of gas so they came to The World’s Number-One Source!”

  Fahd was laughing so hard he dumped his plate over, Mr. Dillinger’s carefully prepared gourmet dried eggs-and-sausage mix spilling out onto the campsite ground, where it was instantly coated with long, rust-coloured pine needles.

  “They shoulda tried his hockey bag!” shouted Simon.

  “Not likely,” added Sarah. “I would think even aliens from outer space have noses.” She then turned sharply on Nish, her face twisted in mock seriousness. “Or do they, Nish? After all, you’re the one who spent the night with them, aren’t you?”

  Nish felt his face burning as red as the flashing lights that had fallen out of the sky last night. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He hated when his face burned like this. He’d even gone to Dr. Witherspoon once, claiming he had a “blushing disorder.” He asked the doctor for a pill or a vaccination that would put a stop to it, but the doctor had just chuckled, causing Nish to turn as red as the liquid inside the thermometer Dr. Witherspoon insisted on jabbing down his throat.

  He was sure he was even redder than that now. They were all laughing at him – Sam especially, who was pleased to get a little revenge for all the jokes Nish had been making about her new fashion statement. Unusual fashion trends were nothing new to Sam – she’d already been through a “combat” phase and a “skateboarder” phase – but now she’d gone “pop star” on her teammates over the summer, showing up for lacrosse practices wearing baggy sweatshirts studded with r
hinestones, bluejean cutoffs with red sequins sewn onto them in strange designs, and a vast variety of colourful T-shirts, each with the face of the latest female singing sensation – none of which Nish could stand.

  Well, let them laugh. Nish knew, absolutely, to the bottom of his pounding heart, that the spaceship had landed on the beach at the foot of the campsite. He had felt paralyzed as the huge flashing saucer whirred and hissed and then, ever so quietly, settled down softly while the red and white and green lights continued to spin and flash.

  He could vividly remember the door opening like a great drawbridge on an old castle. An extraordinarily white light seemed to pour out of the opening and slip down the gangway and stop, spinning so fast in front of Nish that it seemed to him the light itself had taken form.

  And such form! Lizard head and snake tongue, shark body and the furious eyes of a hawk. Eight arms each ended in a different appendage that seemed more tool than hand. One “hand” a wrench, one a Phillips screwdriver, one a can opener, one a long knife, one a hypodermic needle, one a pair of scissors, one a digital camera, one a roll of toilet paper.

  Toilet paper?

  Well, that was how it looked at the time to Nish. He had been frozen solid, immobilized as the creature injected him with some strange fluorescent serum. And then the creature’s knife, with a thin laser of brilliant green light beaming from it, had come down straight from the middle of Nish’s head and sliced him perfectly in half.

  In two separate parts, Wayne Nishikawa had been taken up into the saucer and laid out on a table like a perfectly split squash. More creatures made of light gathered around the table like kids in a pet store as the two halves of Nish were poked and prodded and examined.

  He could see, but he couldn’t move. And what he saw next was so bizarre that – even though he had just told the rest of the Owls that a flying saucer had landed at their Algonquin Park campsite and he had been abducted by aliens from outer space – he could not tell them this part.

  Now a different coloured beam of light came from the tip of the knife – fluorescent red rather than green – and it was directed into one side of Nish’s swollen, distended stomach. When the tip of the light came out, it was carrying something oddly familiar. Something that looked like cloth, with small Toronto Maple Leafs logos all over it.